


One Look Like That

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [279]
Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 19th Century, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Feelings Repressed, God Forbid the Two of You Talk, M/M, Mutual Pining, Penetrative Sex, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-06-02 02:56:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19432477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: It was Xavier’s sand-in-the-shoe quality, his unerring instincts about what to say or do even in mixed company that would make Erik’s better sense snarl and strain at its socially acceptable chain that intrigued him, and not the ineffable air about him that made Erik feel as if the man were the magnet and he a stray bit of steel--no, it wasn’t that.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Victorian Era. Prompt from this [generator](https://colormayfade.tumblr.com/generator).
> 
> And if you are new to the Mental Mimosa series, I strongly suggest you read an important note about how MM works [here](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1012767).

Charles Xavier, Esquire was without question the most infuriating man that Erik Lehnsherr had ever met. Which was undoubtedly why he found the fool so fascinating.

Yes, it was Xavier’s sand-in-the-shoe quality, his unerring instincts about what to say or do even in mixed company that would make Erik’s better sense snarl and strain at its socially acceptable chain that intrigued him, and not the ineffable air about him that made Erik feel as if the man were the magnet and he a stray bit of steel--no, it wasn’t that. It wasn’t Charles’s deeply blue eyes or the cut of his coat across his shoulders or the delicate skin of his wrists that peeped above his shirtsleeves, the strange twist in Erik’s gut that came to life when they were seated across from one another at supper or stood at the billiard table after supper, Charles drinking, Erik smoking, eyes on the green felt and the clacking balls and that energy between them, even when they weren’t speaking. Surely it was none of those things.

Charles was engaged. Erik was soon to be. Never mind that Erik’s mind, his body had not felt a similar tumult in the presence of Miss Frost, the woman whom he had dutifully courted for two years, as it did when he but thought of Charles these days, when he came in from an afternoon of reading by the lake to find Charles holding court in the garden, his sister’s friends and his mother’s gathered about him, their afternoon of tea and conversation turned joyfully into Charles’s hands.

“Erik!” the ladies would cry as he passed, book beneath his arm and his face flushed with the sun. “Charles has just told the most marvellous joke. Come, now. We’ll get him to tell it again.”

And Erik would mumble something polite and not at all contrite and scurry past them into the cool shadows of the house and out of the range of the sound of Charles’s laughter, the sure sweep of his hands, and those eyes. Those damnable, knowing eyes.

There were nights when he awoke in a sweat, his body still alight with the fingers of a dream, and he would reach for himself without thinking, old habits borne of his youth, and work himself mindlessly to completion, his fist moving beneath his nightclothes, the sheet, and only when the dam shattered would he understand what had been driving him, what he’d dreamed of, what he clung to even now in the first tremors of dawn: an image of Charles looking down at him, stretched over him, no sign now of that ridiculous, carefree smirk. In its place, a look stitched together with heat and afternoon sunlight and shaped into the face of desire, of need, of some unspoken, unspeakable greed, and Erik would squeeze his eyes closed as the pleasure came and wish with all his cobwebbed heart and damaged soul for Charles to look at him like that, just once. Once was all it would take, all he’d need to sustain himself through the years of marriage to come, the duty, the children, the respectable life: one look like that, and one kiss.

But there was a reason that, in the moment when he realized what he’d done, where his mind had just taken him, Erik’s face would burn and he would be swallowed by fear and by shame: gentlemen did not want to lay with other men. They were not aroused by them. They did not touch themselves of a morning and spill over their fists thinking not of the soft unseen bosoms of the woman to whom they would soon profess their love but of Charles Xavier, Esquire, their host and most popular man in the county and have to bite their tongues when they did so to keep from crying out _Charles, my Charles, please. Please. Yes_.

“More toast, Lehnsherr?” Charles would say at the breakfast table. “You look as though you need it. You’re a bit peaky. Did you have trouble sleeping, old boy?”

“No, thank you. I’m quite well.” A flush of heat, something almost like anger; a long, careful breath of control. “Woke up too early, that’s all.”

“Of course.” That familiar warmth in return, a lilt of the hills there, teasing. “I shall speak to the sun tomorrow about sticking her fingers through your window, shall I? Very rude of her to interrupt your dreams.”

“Charles,” Raven cried, tossing a bit of biscuit at her brother. “Stop teasing the poor creature. Erik, darling, it’s quite all right for you to tell him to leave you alone.”

“Erik is perfectly capable of defending himself, Ray.”

“Maybe.” The little girl lifted her chin, fiercer at 12 than most men were at 20. “But he’s a guest. And a man with manners. Unlike some people I could name. He’s not going to get stroppy with you at the table, is he, even when he should.”

“Ah,” Charles said playfully, “don’t worry, darling. Erik isn’t afraid of me. If he wants to tell me off, he will--though, unlike some people I could name, he won’t hold brekkers hostage to do it.” His eyes found Erik’s, blue snapdragons at full coil. “As you say, he’s got far better manners than that.”

“Yes,” Erik said as his blood boiled, as that strange wild thing that Charles drew out of him bared its teeth deep inside him. “Yes, Charles. I do.”

*****  


Six months of that torture, then seven, then eight. Spring slid into summer, well past it, and fall began to bend its knee at night to winter’s coming cold. And still Erik lingered in Charles’s home. 

“No, no,” Charles’s mother said when Erik stammered something out about it, a silly sort of apology. “We’re glad to have you, Mr. Lehnsherr. Surely you must understand that.” She stretched out her hand to him and squeezed his. “My dear boy, your mother was my greatest friend. It’s my pleasure to have you in beneath our roof for however long you wish to stay.”

“I should be getting back to town soon. There are--I have obligations.”

Her smile took on a knowing curve. “Ah, yes. Young Miss Frost. Raven reports her very lovely.” She chuckled. “Though I should warn you that you shall break our Ray’s heart when you ask for Miss Frost’s hand; she’s set rather a store by you herself.”

Erik felt his face color and here Mrs. Xavier let go of his fingers and let out her tinkling laugh. “There, there,” she said. “It’s not as bad as all that. She’ll miss having you about, that’s all. But she’ll recover. And it will be her turn at love soon enough.”

“She’s to be Miss McTaggart’s attendant next spring, yes? Perhaps that will help assuage her rush to grow up for a little while, playing at a wedding from the inside.”

Mrs. Xavier’s smile flickered like a candle caught by a breeze. “Yes, well. I suppose that will be up to Charles, won’t it?” 

“Whatever do you mean?”

Her eyebrows lifted. “Hasn’t Charles told you? There are...complications. It seems he has decided that Miss McTaggart’s attentions are not, in fact, the paradise of goodwill and affection he had hoped them to be. I had hoped it was only a wavering of nerves, but now, my dear, I’m not so sure. He’s stopped speaking about it to me.” She leaned towards him, her needlepoint sliding to the edge of her lap. “I know you two are not friends, Erik, I know, but perhaps you could sound him out for me, yes? I’m not sure how concerned I should be. I'm sure anything you could discover would greatly ease my mind.”

Erik felt trapped, a rabbit caught in a snare. “Ma’am, I really don’t---”

“Please.” Her voice was soft but resolute. It reminded him so well of his mother’s: a feather wrapped in forged iron. “I should be most grateful to you.”

“Yes,” Erik heard himself say after a moment. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

 _For you_ , he thought as he slipped from the library into the drafty turn of the corridor. _And for myself, too_.

Because all at once, inside, he was churning, white caps on the waves of his mind.

Trouble in Charles and Moira’s engagement? How could he have not known? If Raven had been aware, she would have shared it with him; the little girl, for all her charms, was, when it came to the matter of secrets, rather a fantastic siv. 

But more importantly, he thought later, after supper, as he rapped on the door of Charles’s study, why had the knowledge of such troubles brought him a feeling of joy, one that had sustained him through dinner, through brandy, through the slow, nighttime dissolution of the familial ranks until they were the only ones who remained on the ground floor, fed by candles and oil lamps. Why on earth might that be so?

A bark from beyond the door. “Yes?”

“Charles, it’s Erik. Do you have a moment?”

No answer, then footsteps.

“My my,” Charles Xavier said with a smirk in the doorway, “this is extraordinary. I didn’t believe my ears.”

“What? Why?”

Charles laughed. “Don’t you know? In all the time that you’ve been malingering about my house, Erik, this is the first time you’ve ever come to this door, much less set a fist to it so enthusiastically. To what do I owe the occasion?”

Erik thrust up his chin. Somehow, inside him, that spark of joy, of a hope he could not name, refused even in the face of Charles’s ridiculous performance to dim. “If you want to know,” he said with a sharpness that surprised him, a clarity of purpose, “then you’ll have to let me in.”

A raising of the eyebrows. A sweep of the arm.

“My dear boy,” Charles said. “Well then. Do come in.”


	2. Chapter 2

In the lamplight, the study seemed to Erik to be Charles, personified. It was not a large room, nor the finest in the house, but it sat behind a solid lock, the sole one in the house that was taken seriously, and from what Ray had told him in one her exuberant streaks, only Charles himself held the key. Looking about him as he stepped over the threshold and Charles closed the door behind him, Erik began to understand why.

The books that lined the largest wall were the centerpiece of the room, their spines illuminated by the dance of the fire in the grate, signs of all the knowledge that Charles had so carelessly, so easily acquired. The depths of the room, however, lay in shadow; the accoutrements of Charles’s desk by the window, the place where he spent the few serious hours of his day, were lit only by the faint light of the moon. And there sat before the fire two chairs before the fire and a small table between them, upon which sat a stack of papers and a half-empty decanter of port. No, Erik saw as he stepped closer, as Charles threw himself akimbo back into the arms of his chair--less than a quarter of the bottle remained. Which might explain Charles’s apparent readiness at allowing Erik to enter his _sanctum sanctorum_ under what to Erik seemed the flimsiest of circumstances.

But then again, perhaps Charles was simply in the mood for a mystery.

“Well?” Charles said, yanking him from his reverie. “Are you going to stand there like a stone all evening, or are you going to enlighten me as to the reason for your presence here sometime in the next decade?”

“Pardon me from pulling your attention away from what is evidently urgent business.”

“Urgent?”

“That port’s not going to drink itself, is it?”

Charles lay his head back. He laughed. “Don’t tell me you’ve become a teetotaller in your free time, too? God, I didn’t think it was humanly possible for you to be any more of a bore.”

He felt his cheeks flare. “Nor did I think you could be any more of a lush, and yet here you sit, sir, boiling in your own oil.”

“Sir,” Charles said languorously, dangerously (or had Erik imagined?) “Perhaps you’d be kind enough to state your business and leave.” 

“Your mother fears your engagement is in doubt.”

“Does she?”

“She’s heard talk that relations between you and Miss MacTaggart are...strained.”

That got Charles’s attention, those dark eyes brought on Erik to bear. “Talk is just that, Erik. Talk. She needn’t have concerned you with that. Nor should she have.”

“It’s distressing her greatly.”

“All the more reason she should have spoken of it to me herself and not dispatched you to do it for her. Or was it your choice to come, hmmm? Finding new ways, are we, of earning our keep? Well, dear boy, I believe the position of my mother’s lap dog is taken by her poodle and her dear sweet Chow Chow.”

There was a venom in Charles’s voice that Erik understood to be fear; whatever the business was with his Miss MacTaggart, it was indeed troubling him. But there was part of him, too, whose hackles were raised by Charles’s snarl, that ached, in fact, to respond in kind. Perhaps it was the part of him that noticed the hollow of Charles’s throat, the pale skin exposed by the unruly spread of the man’s unkempt collar. There was a flush there, brought on no doubt by the heat of the fire or too much drink--but Erik found that as he stood there, fury rising up his spine, he longed to take those last steps and sink to his knees in front of Charles’s chair so that he might reach out swiftly and press the tips of his fingers to that soft place and follow them with his mouth.

He _wanted_ , and so very badly. It took the best of his breath away.

“She doesn’t know if she should be worried or not; or if so, how much. She’s very keen on you getting married, Charles.”

“I _know_!” A hand banged upon the little table, a leap of papers onto the floor. “I damn well know she is, Lehnsherr. Don’t you dare to lecture me.”

“Then stop acting like a spoiled child and lay the facts before her, man!”

“Before her?” Charles laughed, a crueler sound this time. “Or before you, hmm? Oh, I can see it; don’t you fucking deny it. You’re the one who’s dying to know.”

Erik’s gut twisted. Was his curiosity so apparent? No, he decided; oh, no. Charles had realized he was corned and was trying to get his goat. Well, this time, it damn well wouldn’t work.

“I don’t give a shit about your personal affairs, Xavier. Not everyone’s as fascinated by you as you think.”

“Bullshit, Erik. You think about me all the time.”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

Charles stood, his face a smug, shadowed mask. “You do. I know you do. Don’t have to be a mind-reader to know that. God, if you could only see yourself when you look at me, like you are now, you’d see it’s plain as the dawn on your face.”

Erik’s heart made itself known; it felt as if the damn thing was wedged in his throat. Terror, suddenly; an ice cold lick of fear. No, it couldn’t be. Charles didn’t really know anything. This was another ploy, a gambit. Clearly he had the man on the run now.

He steeled his voice, curled his fingers hard around the back of the opposing chair, and did not, no matter how much he wished to, deign to give in and look away. “What you see, Charles, isn’t fascination. It’s contempt.”

“Oh, the hell it is.” Charles took a step towards him. “You think I don’t know what another man’s desire looks like? I’ve seen it a hundred times before. In my club, for example. Sometimes on the street. Even my doctor once, when he had me down to my skivvies; he took one look at me and had to stop and really, truly think.” He grinned, thin and vicious. “For a moment, dear boy, I’d swear he didn’t quite know where he should put his hands.”

“You,” Erik said, “are a self-absorbed fool.”

“And you,” Charles said, a mere step from him now, separated only the width of the wingback, “are a repressed, needy asshole who still yearns for his mother.”

Anger now, that flame that always rose whenever the world conspired to remind him of his mother’s death. “At least I cared for mine! You show yours nothing but contempt.”

“She may be my mother, Lehnsherr, but this is my bloody house. Never forget that, hmm? You think you’re living on her generosity and oh, you are. But this is my house, my property, so she lives here on mine.”

“Why do you hate her so?”

“Hate is a ridiculous waste of energy. I merely loathe her, hmm?”

“Why?”

“How many times do I have to tell you?” Charles spat, crawling into the chair on his knees and sneering into Erik’s face. “It’s not of your goddamned business.”

“Maybe it is.”

“Why? Because you wish it so? Because you’re dying to believe I give a tinker’s cuss what you think?”

“The details of your love life are your own affair. I’m merely suggesting that you understand that what you choose to do or not do in such matters affects people other than you.”

Charles made a low sound, one that made Erik’s cock twitch. “Yes, they do. Have you not considered, Erik, that that is one fact of which I am keenly fucking aware?”

Then his hands were on the lapels of Erik’s dinner jacket and he was yanking, tugging, dragging Erik down into the hot well of his mouth and Erik was clasping Charles’s hair, his fingers moving like madness and when their tongues touched, when Charles made that low, lovely sound again, something in him gave way at last, a dam of crystal suddenly shattered, and there was now, a voice in his mind gleefully whispered, from this moment on, Lehnsherr, absolutely no turning back.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt for this, the last chapter: I had convinced myself that I was in love with someone else. Prompt from this [generator](https://colormayfade.tumblr.com/generator).

"I had convinced myself,” Charles said very carefully, “that I was in love with someone else.”

That he was able to enunciate each syllable so distinctly was, Erik thought, a testament to the man’s concentration. He couldn’t think of many men who would have been able to speak so precisely while he was penetrating them. Ever so slowly, mind, which might have been part of it; slowly, as Charles arched beneath him on the divan. The man’s shirt was parted--torn, really, but that was Charles’s own fault for not divesting himself of it fast enough--and his trousers were lost somewhere on the floor, tangled to the last with his shoes. His eyes were wide and his skin was deliciously wet, ablaze from all that had come before and now, as Erik took that last inch at last, Charles Xavier, Esquire bloody well shook.

That did not put a stop to his recitation, however, after a brief interregnum:

“Dear _God_.”

Erik bent to kiss him, soft and wild. “Does that feel good?”

“No.” Charles’s voice was foolscap, transparent and easily torn. “No, it does not, it feels...have mercy on me, Erik. It feels like too much.”

For a moment, Erik felt a bubble of fear--had he hurt Charles in his haste?--but then Charles’s fingers brushed his temple, painted the sweat there, and when he looked into Charles’s eyes again, what he saw there made his lungs stop.

“Now I wonder,” Charles murmured, “now I question myself, darling, my own capacity for reason. For how I could have thought that the gentle palpitations of my heart at the sight of Miss McTaggart’s ivory bosom were enough to be named _love_ or even _lust_ as compared to this, to what I feel even when only our eyes meet, and now our bodies--!”

“What is it you feel for her, then?” There was a tang in the words, a sort of bitterness that Erik found he could not suppress. 

Charles’s knuckles tumbled over his cheek. “The weight of obligation, I suppose. That ever-present need to do what it expected of me. A nice wife, a few children; a fitting coda to my father’s legacy. I thought I loved her because I was supposed to.”

“But you don’t want her. You want me.”

A thumb hooked his bottom lip. “So it would very much seem.”

He withdrew from Charles’s heat, just enough so he could plunge back inside, and oh, there was a sort of viciousness about it, a fierce and terrible joy. “Don’t speak in riddles when I’m fucking you, Charles.”

“Then shut up and fuck me properly, darling.”

He snarled and snapped and began to work himself in and out of that heavenly body, Charles’s groans only egging him on. He could hear the squelch of the oil he’d used, so much of it, poured from a small, cinnamon-smelling bottle Charles had yanked from a drawer. He’d lain back on the divan in his torn shirt, Charles had, and shown Erik how to feed him his fingers one by one, how to move them, the best way to make Charles’s opening ready for him. Charles had touched himself as they worked in tandem, Charles guiding, Erik following, until Charles had been so hot and senseless that he could only lift his hips towards Erik’s hand and softly, urgently beg.

And then Erik had acquiesced and opened his trousers, pushed them down just enough, and suddenly Charles had reacquired his tongue. 

Well, it was Erik’s now, both in the actual and the practical, for the deeper he pushed into Charles’s body, the farther he drove Charles from speech, from the pretty words of every day, from the good son, the good brother, the man who in building his future considered his family first.

It wasn’t that Erik didn’t care for Charles’s mother and sister. He did. But in that moment, as they battled each other in front of the fire, he cared about what he wanted more. And what he wanted what Charles: Charles opening to him, Charles stroking his skin, Charles growing stiff again between them and moaning like a whore in Erik’s face. None of the young ladies he’d squired, Erik was damn well certain, had ever seen Charles like this.

“Oh, God,” Charles panted, clawing at the swell of Erik’s ass. “Oh, God. Don’t stop.”

“Does that feel good?” Erik asked again. “Do you like my cock in you, Charles?”

Here a grin, here a kiss, here a shudder that seemed to go on forever. “ _Yes_.”

Then they were racing each other, chasing, a hound and a hare in the field. Charles’s hand on his cock, staggered, Erik’s thrusts going shorter and harder and hot. They could not stop kissing; they could barely breathe, and there was part of Erik that felt alive for the first time, a wolf released from its chain. He had never in his life wanted anything, anyone so much and when Charles’s body became a vise and the man’s back bowed, he had enough sense to kiss the man then, to swallow the sweet wine of his scream as between them Charles shot creamy heat.

What could he do then but let the wolf run for the hills, let his hips fly as Charles threw his head back and whimpered and when he reached the heights, the place he’d denied himself for so long, Erik lost all voice and all reason and poured himself out.

“That’s it.” Charles’s hands were in his hair, weaving, his voice in Erik’s ear velvet soft. “Let me have all of you, darling. That’s what I want from you, always. Every inch of you, every drop.”

When it was quiet again, the pounding of his heart subsided, Erik said: “I adore you.”

“Do you? I thought you cursed the ground that I walked on. Or so your face has always seemed to say.”

Erik nuzzled Charles’s cheek. “You want me, too. You love me. You said as much.”

“Did I?” Charles chuckled, his fingers roaming the hot wet of Erik’s back. “Well, then. I must have meant it.”

“God, Charles, are you incapable of being earnest unless I have my cock inside you?”

“Well, darling. That did help. Rather hard to lie to oneself when confronted with what you desire. With what you’ve always known deep down that you want. And the more that you’ve malingered about in my life, that more and more that’s been you.”

“You’ve got a damned odd way of showing it.”

“As do you. When’s the last time we have a conversation that lasted more than three sentences, eh?”

“I’ve always found it hard to get a word in edgewise.” He bit a kiss into Charles’s neck, grinned when Charles gasped. “You are incredibly fond of the sound of your own voice, even _in flagrante delicto_.”

“Yes, well, in your company, I’m usually required to do all of the talking. You can’t blame me for sticking to old habits, can you?” He turned his head and found Erik’s mouth, devoured it. “Usually the tried and true works best.”

There was so much still to be said, so much to be determined. Miss McTaggart, for example; Miss Frost. The weight of so many obligations. But in that moment, growing ardent again in Charles’s arms, Erik found it easy to forget them, to focus solely on the beautiful and infuriating man who lay beneath him, sighing softly, his thighs wet with Erik’s own seed, his cock plumping gently as they kissed and kissed and kissed.

"You are very good at this."

Erik chuckled. "No need to sound surprised."

"Isn't there?" Charles nipped at his lip. "Isn't your Miss Frost rather an ice queen? So I've heard, at least."

"Miss Frost is very much a lady, thank you."

Charles snorted. "Which means you've never kissed her, have you? Ah, so my surprise is justified."

"I have been acquainted with ladies other than she, Charles."

Charles kissed him again hungrily, his breath catching in the back of Erik's throat. "Is that so? Hmm. So tell me, which of them taught you to use your tongue quite like this?"

"I don't think that's any of your damned business."

"You misunderstand me, darling." A grin. "I should like to send them flowers by way of thanks."

In the morning, they would have to be themselves again: Charles Xavier, Esquire and Erik Lensherr, semi-poor relation and long-term houseguest. Two boy that had grown up with eyes on each other, warily, that had seasoned into men who wanted the other beyond all reason and every scrap of good sense. It would not be as simple a matter to resolve as it seemed when they were touching, exploring, loving; others would be hurt. They could be shunned. There might be new lives that had to be made.

For now, though, Erik thought only of Charles, of all he made Erik want and desire as he slithered out from beneath him and pushed Erik onto his back.

“I very much think,” Charles said with a devilish smile, “that it’s time these damnable things finally come off, don’t you?”

And when they were both naked and racing again, his cock tucked up inside Charles’s wild, greedy body, his fist turned over Charles’s member, Erik could only feel what he knew without question was love.

Charles’s palm found his heart, braced. “Oh, God, Erik. _God_.”

“That’s it,” Erik said, his lips sliding into a smirk. “Right there, love. Come for me. That’s it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Finis._


End file.
